I had the opportunity to see Kill Bill 1 and 2 last Saturday with John, Eirik, Daniel, and André. That was bit special. Sitting in the movie theatre for two movies in a row, that is. I had seen Kill Bill 1 a while back and remembered it as being an above average movie, but for some reason I had never been overly thrilled about it. Would have rated it as Interesting back then. Seeing it for the second time was a revelation. It was so much better the second time! Now I am rating it as Excellent.

I have to admit that I am even tempted to rate it as a Masterpiece. There is however one scene in the movie which ruins some of its glory. I am talking about the battle scene where Beatrix Kiddo AKA Black Mamba (Uma Thurman) wears her cool yellow suit and chops down O-Ren's (Lucy Liu) Crazy 88 army. That scene was just silly and dumb. There are a lot of unreal things in the movie (like having a Samurai sword on the airplane), but this was the only time where it became to much. Every other scene in the movie fooled you into thinking it could possible happen in real life.... But no one person would be able to get away alive from such a crowd of crazy guys with sharp Samurai swords. I want my movies to be in the same believable "tone". Either all believable, or just completly unbelievable. I basically don't like jumping between believable-levels The rest of the movie was however brilliant. The use of colors, dialogs, music, cartoon, etc. It all blended into a nice mixture which I really appreciated ( except for that one scene).

Watching that scene, however, made me realize that I am becoming immune to blood and gore. I think I have seen to many killing movies lately. The Passions of the Christ, The Last Samurai, and now Kill Bill. I could watch that scene without covering my eyes. I think this is a bad trend that movies are competing about being the most disgusting, with the most blood, and with the highest number of amputated body parts. Will we all be immune and start thinking this is normal? I am old and wise enough to know that I shouldn't do anything like that to people in the streets, but are kids gonna be able to distringuish right from wrong? I think I am finally convinced that brutal computer games and movies can have negative impact on kids. Before I was always a bit skeptical that they could really influence them but after seeing movies have an influence on my brutality tolerance level I am a bit worried. I am soon gonna be craving for more blood, gore, and pain:-) .

Anyway, back to the movie. The second Kill Bill movie was not as fantastic as the first one. Think I maybe need to see it again to appreciate it:-) Will be interesting to see if I rate it in the same way then. I am only going to rate it as Interesting for now. There was something missing in that movie. The first movie had a lot of extraordinary scenes which gave the movie as special feel. The Japanese cartoon and the white Japanese garden scene, for example. The second movie had no such scene. Think the two movies were out of balance with the second one being much "flatter" than the first one. The only thing really sticking out in the second movie were Pai Mei's eyebrows:-).